Southeast Asian Rosewood
This Ken Franklin tenor has Southeast Asian rosewood for the back and sides. It's another twenty year old set from my stock that I've just come around to using. Southeast Asian rosewood is very dense much like Honduran rosewood but with more vibrant colors. The unique musical response supports a wide tonal range. It's a sweet sounding instrument with good sustain and lush overtones.
This is aided by a Spanish Cypress soundboard which is also from my older stock. It's often used for the back and sides of flamenco guitars but makes a fine ukulele top. Along with my x-bracing design this true cypress enhances note to note separation for excellent clarity. I've created a rosette with some of my more colorful tiles to complement the rosewood.
The interior linings are solid laminated maple that are hand carved in place. They are notched into the neck and tail blocks for better support of the top and back.
The silver birch neck is attached to the body with two bolts in the heel. One is on the inside and the other goes through a brass strap button in the heel. The neck has a rosewood headplate and a silver birch backplate.
A reinforced sound port improves listening enjoyment for the player and helps balance the tonal response up and down the neck.
I used katalox for the fretboard and string through bridge. It's a very dense hardwood that is sometimes sold as Mexican royal ebony even though it's not in the ebony family. There are cascading brass position markers. The fretboard compound radius is 16 to 20 inches. The body has katalox bindings with purpleheart and cherry purflings. Frets are StewMac gold with polished rounded fret ends.
The finish is a high gloss catalyzed urethane lacquer with a clear pickguard to help protect the soundboard.
The gold Gotoh UPTL tuners have custom rosewood buttons. I have set this Ken Franklin tenor up with Worth brown BT strings and a Pepe Romero low G which accentuate the tenor's sweetness. The intonated unbleached bone saddle is 1 9/16" from the G to the A strings. The unbleached nut is 1 1/2". Scale length is 17". It comes in a hard case. $5300.
